Axway — Blue Vector — Gebhardt Announces Global Track & Trace Alliance

Alliance Offers Solution Framework for Achieving Shipment Excellence and Enabling the Transparent Supply Chain

ORLANDO, Flor., HDMA/DMC - Axway, Blue Vector and Gebhardt have created an alliance to provide a complete solution for secure and efficient prescription drug supply chain. Organizations in the alliance each contribute their respective expertise, including drug pedigree, track and trace, edge process management, intelligent logistics solution and implementation. This alliance is part of the global serialization track and trace initiative to enable new business value across the supply chain that Axway established in April 2008.

Stakeholders in the pharmaceutical supply chain want to ensure the highest level of shipment efficiency as possible. Reducing latency in the supply chain by avoiding rework due to problem shipments, on-time delivery and reducing out-of-stock situations because of incorrect deliveries is a common goal across the industry. The serialization initiatives that companies are embarking on are critical for regulatory compliance, supporting key business requirements and offering opportunities to expose new business value. Axway, Blue Vector and Gebhardt are providing a complete end-to-end solution enabling value added operational efficiencies for both non-serialized and serialized supply chain operations.

An example is at a shipping dock where containers are loaded onto trailers. By using Gebhardt logistics solutions, totes are loaded on reusable RFID-enabled dollies for easy loading and offloading from trailers. The dollies and their totes are linked to the shipment manifest route and sequence information which is cached on a Blue Vector shipping portal located at the dock door. As the dolly passes through the portal, loading errors are immediately detected and corrected via instructional output to an operator through an operator device or other displays. This provides tremendous value to companies as they seek to make their customer-facing supply chain operations as reliable and accurate as their automated internal processes. These events managed between Blue Vector's intelligent Edge and Axway's Track & Trace solution can also be leveraged to trigger other activities to occur. For example, a "shipment complete" event could trigger Pedigree creation (the point where it is likely to be most accurate), notification to store (ASN), customer invoice or automatic billing to store cost center.

"Today's global economy is forcing organizations to take proactive steps to maintain the integrity and security of their products while assuring the accuracy of their shipments as they move from point of manufacture to end consumer," said Romen Kuloor, VP Business Development, BlueVector. "By extending business intelligence to the operational edge, and enabling critical real-time data to operators, this collaborative solution will provide mission critical supply chain data where and when it is needed. This allows companies to realize value from their serialization investments today while preparing for Pedigree and other regulatory compliance tomorrow." Blue Vector provides a process automation system that is helping companies enable new business solutions that improve efficiencies and reduce costs through automating and extending operational business processes from ERP, WMS and other applications to the IT edge of operations. Blue Vector's distributed system allows for local decision making with real-time response times to ensure the information for the right process gets to the right systems and people on the operations floor.

"Supply chains have become increasingly complex, driving companies to take time, touches and costs out of all aspects of their operations," said L. Klaus Preidt, Key Account Manager USA for Gebhardt. "The right logistics solutions combined with intelligent ship accuracy solutions enhance the value in reducing delivery time to improving order accuracy and fulfillment, eliminating costs both at the store and distribution operations."

By collecting and making sense of event data, Axway's Synchrony Supply Chain Integrity Suite creates immediate, actionable intelligence about supply-chain performance. This suite improves operational efficiency through supply chain visibility. It assures data integrity in supply-chain transactions; enables product authentication, provides secure, role-based access; and can be integrated with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Its customizable business rules can adapt quickly to changes in regulations, business practices or partner requirements, and across global operations.

"Pharmaceutical companies, distributors and retailers are increasingly interested in enabling operational efficiencies while deploying solutions that meet their key business requirements as to minimize counterfeiting and diversion," said Sia Zadeh, Director, Business Development, Axway. "This alliance is yet another example of our commitment to helping minimize those risks while allowing companies to leverage their investments in serialization to achieve new business value."

For additional information on Synchrony Supply Chain Integrity Suite, please visit: www.axway.com/solutions/healthcare.php.

 

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About Axway

Axway is the Business Interaction Networks company — the only provider in the market today to manage, run, secure, and monitor all of your business interactions, including email, files, messaging, services, events, and processes. Serving over 11,000 organizations in more than 100 countries, Axway facilitates the multi-enterprise transactions, processes and integration that accelerate business by eliminating the barriers between vendors, customers, departments, partners and suppliers. Axway's comprehensive offerings include business-to-business integration, managed file transfer, secure email, business activity monitoring, enterprise application integration, service-oriented architecture, business process management, track & trace and identity validation solutions. Axway provides professional and managed services, as well as cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, Axway's global presence spans 20 countries.

About Blue Vector Systems

Blue Vector is the trusted choice of industry leaders who are revolutionizing their operations by extending the reach of their current business processes to the edge of their operations. An offshoot of groundbreaking research into highly distributed military sensor networks, Blue Vector's technology puts RFID, barcode, temperature, GPS and motion sensors to work for leading businesses who need to control remote inventory, improve their shipping accuracy, monitor the movement of assets, or track the progress of individual items throughout their supply chain. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information, please visit

www.bluevector.com

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About Gebhardt

As a company Gebhardt has set the standard for storage and transportation systems since 1829. A leader in developing sector-specific solutions for the transportation and storage of goods and products across a multitude of different industries, Gebhardt has played a major role in defining the very process of the discipline. Gebhardt is able to develop highly tactical solutions for specific category factors. That said, their ability to retain an overall market viewpoint enables fluid integration across all sectors. It's this unwavering attention to detail on the small-scale, in keeping with big picture knowledge, that continues to keep Gebhardt at the forefront of its industry and a valued partner for many others. For more information, please visit

www.gebhardtlp.com

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